Understanding the complexities of belonging in a post-colonial nation
Jews have long been a political boon as well as a political liability for Morocco. As of December 10, Morocco became the most recent Muslim majority state to agree to normalize relations with Israel in exchange for American recognition of the kingdom’s claims to the long-contested Western Sahara. The deal, brokered by President Trump, follows Bahrain, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates. As “unprecedented” as many of the Trump administration’s moves may have been, however, this recent Moroccan-American-Israeli agreement has its roots in the Cold War era. Further, there is a complex internal Moroccan Jewish story within the Western Sahara conflict, which itself sheds light on the history of Jewish political belonging.
I am a scholar of modern Moroccan Jewish history, and have recently written a book, The Sultan's Communists », tracing the long arc of Moroccan Jewish political history in the twentieth century, including the pivotal question of Western Sahara. In it, I show that the 1975 Green March, in which Morocco laid claim to Western Sahara in the name of Islam and the nation, was a prime opportunity for Moroccan Jews to prove their patriotism. Moroccan Jews both at home and in the Diaspora overwhelmingly supported the claim. One of them, former Moroccan national liberation leader Simon Lévy, joined the many hundred-thousand strong Green March. Lévy, a prominent Moroccan Jewish Communist who only ten years prior had been kidnapped off the streets of Casablanca and brutally tortured by police for his politics, was proud to participate in this gesture of, as he and the state saw it, restitution of Moroccan land wrongly severed by colonial forces. Another prominent Moroccan Jewish political figure, Abraham Serfaty, would languish in prison for nearly twenty years as a result of his support for the Polisario front, Western Sahara’s primary national independence group. Both men rejected Zionism out of their ardent Moroccan patriotism, and saw those Moroccan Jews who left for Israel as “traitors” to the nation. They differed profoundly, however, in their vision of Western Sahara’s relationship to imperialism, as well as the nature of Moroccan-Israeli relations.[1]
In the 1980s, Morocco increasingly advertised Jewish tourism campaigns, marketed in particular to Israelis of Moroccan origin.
By the time of the Green March, King Hassan II had survived two attempted coup attempts in 1971 and 1972. He was a deeply unpopular monarch and harshly repressive to his political opponents. At the same time, the king had been meeting clandestinely with Israeli and American Jewish representatives since the early 1970s, and by the later 1970s had positioned himself as a potential peace broker between Israeli and Palestinian representatives. While the king earned praise for his relatively moderate stance toward Israel and his open embrace of Moroccan Jews, including those who had migrated to Israel, he was responsible for human rights atrocities that would give his reign the moniker the “Years of Lead,” in which so many political opposition figures were tortured and disappeared forever. Thus, when Abraham Serfaty cried out at his 1977 trial: “Long live the Democratic Sahrawi Arab Republic! Long live the Democratic Republic of Morocco! Long live the union of the Moroccan and Sahrwai peoples!,”[2] he had become an enemy of the state. Simon Lévy, on the other hand, in his victorious 1976 Casablanca municipal campaign crowed on one of his leaflets: “On November 6, 1975, Simon Lévy was among the first to set foot in the liberated Moroccan Sahara in the glorious Green March.”[3]
In the 1980s, Morocco increasingly advertised Jewish tourism campaigns, marketed in particular to Israelis of Moroccan origin. The king, as his father before him, openly invited back all Moroccan Jews, wherever they may have scattered, as “his children.” Such trips became openly possible in the late 1970s, after King Hassan II worked assiduously with Israel, Egypt and the United States first to bring Egyptian President Sadat to Israel in 1977 and then to secure the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, following the 1978 Camp David accords.[4] Soon after, the Council of the Jewish Communities of Morocco (CJCM) began to centralize hilulot (pilgrimages) and combine them with sweeping touristic visits in Morocco, actively recruiting the Moroccan Jewish “diaspora” in Israel, France, Canada and beyond.[5] Hassan II, always an adept politician, saw the value in Jewish tourism and working with the United States in the broader troubles of the Middle East and North Africa; such an increased partnership, already strong due to Cold War alliances, would bring economic gains.[6]
uncovers the history of Jewish radical involvement in Morocco's national liberation project and examines how Moroccan Jews envisioned themselves participating as citizens in a newly-independent Morocco.
All the while, violence in the Western Sahara raged on, not only on the ground but also against any Sahrawi independence supporters, including one of Morocco’s most infamous politically active Jews. Local Moroccan human rights groups at home and in France militated actively for Abraham Serfaty and other prisoners of conscience, leading ultimately to Serfaty’s release from prison in 1991, stripping him of his Moroccan citizenship and expulsion to France, accompanied on the airplane by a Jewish community appointee of the king for good measure. When Hassan II died in 1999, his son, Muhammad VI, became king. He welcomed back dissidents such as Serfaty, and the King established a Truth and Reconciliation commission to address the Years of Lead. When 9/11 struck in 2001 and Casablanca experienced a terrorist attack in 2003 that disproportionately targeted Jewish sites, Moroccan and American interests aligned against a new international threat in the Global War on Terror. This political climate made Moroccan Jews, including leftists who had previously been state pariahs such as Simon Lévy and Abraham Serfaty, into national assets who demonstrated Moroccan liberal ideas in the face of intolerance. The commodification of Moroccan Jews, already in process since the late 1970s, came to include the Moroccan Jewish Communists as well, symbols of tolerance against religious extremism.[7]
Morocco’s agreement, then, to formalize ties with Israel in exchange for American acknowledgement of its claims over Western Sahara are in and of themselves hardly novel. It has been, as in the case of so many other regional players who have recently made similar agreements, very long in the making. A unique feature in this case, however, is the political diversity among Moroccan Jews themselves, and their complex history of political belonging in a post-colonial Muslim nation state in North Africa.
Alma Rachel Heckman is the author of The Sultan’s Communists: Moroccan Jews and the Politics of Belonging (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021); she is the Neufeld-Levin Chair of Holocaust Studies and an Assistant Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
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Notes
[1] These statements are distillations of material in my peer reviewed book, The Sultan’s Communists: Moroccan Jews and the Politics of Belonging (Stanford University Press, 2021), particularly chapter 5 titled “Co-Optation: The Moroccan Cold War, Israel, and Human Rights.”
[2] “Maroc: La repression au Maroc du temps du protectorat 1951-1992 les expulsions” by René Toussant for ADATAM – Association de defense des anciens travailleurs au Maroc, Paris, Archives de la Seine-Saint-Denis, PCF archives, 67 J 80.
[3] Document from Simon Lévy’s personal papers, “Aux électeurs et électrices de la 3ème Cinsonscription (Commune d’Ain Diab).”
[4] André Levy, Return to Casablanca: Jews, Muslims, and an Israeli Anthropologist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 188.
[5] Oren Kosansky, “Tourism, Charity, and Profit: The Movement of Money in Moroccan Jewish Pilgrimage” Cultural Anthropology vol. 17 no. 3 Value in Circulation (Aug. 2002):359-400, 367-368.
[6] André Levy, Return to Casablanca: Jews, Muslims, and an Israeli Anthropologist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 188. Part of this paragraph is excerpted from chapter 5 “Co-Optation: The Moroccan Cold War, Israel, and Human Rights,” in Heckman, The Sultan’s Communists: Moroccan Jews and the Politics of Belonging (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021), 218.
[7] Part of this paragraph is excerpted from chapter 5 “Co-Optation: The Moroccan Cold War, Israel, and Human Rights,” in Heckman, The Sultan’s Communists: Moroccan Jews and the Politics of Belonging (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021), 223.
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